From the celebrated neurobiologist and primatologist, a landmark, genre-defining
examination of human behavior, both good and bad, and an answer to the question:
Why do we do the things we do?
Sapolsky's storytelling concept is delightful but it also has a powerful
intrinsic logic: he starts by looking at the factors that bear on a person's
reaction in the precise moment a behavior occurs, and then hops back in time
from there, in stages, ultimately ending up at the deep history of our species
and its evolutionary legacy.
And so the first category of explanation is the neurobiological one. A behavior
occurs--whether an example of